BitterSweetLife

The other day I happened to drive by a glossy whiskey billboard, newly decked out for the holidays. "THE LONGER YOU WAIT…THE BETTER IT GETS" the slogan suggested.

A weak-kneed colt contrasted a stallion in full racing regalia, galloping across a finish line. The prerequisite amber bottle glowed prominently between.

Maybe my mind had taken a pessimistic turn that afternoon, but I thought, Why not show a third picture, maybe ten years down the road? You know, the emaciated old horse abandoned in his paddock. Or maybe just a bag of dog food…

To be fair, the billboard wasn’t that awful; it just grated on a perpetual sore spot of mine, an entrenched dislike for cultural assumptions masquerading as a priori truth. When people act as if reality changes, the world magically realigning itself just because they made an assertion, it always gets me.

"The longer you wait, the better it gets?" Will any of us be making that claim in 90 years? Not about alcohol, anyway. I know, I know—that’s not really the point of the ad. But blunt assertions, absorbed gradually over a lifetime, aren’t without effect.

I can think of a few more cultural credos which imply tacit "absolutes." Consider the Budweiser creed: life revolves around beer and flirtatious women (and in that order). And this, it is casually suggested, is the essence of what we consider TRUE.

But truth, to be true, must be supportable at every level. In the case of the Budweiser creed, a host of logical assumptions follow, none of which are really sustainable. Such as, What’s the role of family? (Do kids even exist in the Bud universe?) How about responsible work, the kind you do when you’re not living for the weekend? And where can I find a case for women as multifaceted beings, not objects?

Ultimately, cultural premises with absolutist aspirations are nothing new. The familiar content of our wanna-be truisms should tip us off to the fact that this phenomenon is anything but modern. As the old Greek idiom ran, "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die." Sounds pretty TRUE to me.

"Ah, c’mon!" you might tease me. "Those are just commercials, man, not life! People are smart enough to know the difference."

To which I would agree, "Yeah, people certainly are."

But I’m not convinced they do. So until we’re all fully prescient and entirely aware of life’s subtle nuances, truth needs to be proved before it’s truth.